Last Friends

by Jane Gardam (Europa)

The satisfying conclusion to Gardam’s “Old Filth” trilogy opens with the deaths of the rivals who dominated the previous novels—Sir Edward Feathers and Sir Terence Veneering. The narrative then alternates between the story of Veneering’s impoverished upbringing in interwar England and the exploits of his last remaining contemporaries—Dulcie, an addle-brained widow, and Fred Fiscal-Smith, an insufferable childhood friend. Veneering’s story is pure Dickensian fable: the son of a Russian circus-performer father and a mother who works delivering coal, he rises through tragedy and obscurity to become a famous barrister. The alternating chapters are poignant and comical meditations on growing old, as Dulcie and Fiscal-Smith ponder the “end of it all.” The two strands never quite come together, but the book is borne along by Gardam’s exquisite prose, wry humor, and keen insights into aging and death. “That is the sharpness of loss,” Dulcie muses. “The feelings don’t go, even when the brain has begun to wither and stray.” ♦

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